Rebuff to British prosecutors speaks volumes about Putin

On Tuesday, Great Britain's Crown Prosecution Service announced its belief that it had identified a highly credible suspect in the radiation-poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who had become an outspoken critic of the Putin regime.

The British prosecutors said they were convinced that Andrei Lugovoy, an agent in the service of Putin's government, contrived to kill Litvinenko by exposing him to a fatal dosage of radioactive polonium-21 last November. They called on Moscow to clear the way for Lugovoy's extradition so that he could stand trial for the murder in Britain.

The response from the Putin government was a swift and scornful rejection.

With each passing day, it grows more agonizingly obvious that Putin is intent on building a new Russia that is all about coercion and self-aggrandizement. He has no use for Marxism; far from it. He is, rather, building a brutal and deeply corrupt new order in which brute power will rule, and in which the assertion of Russian primacy through use of its energy reserves and intimidation of weaker neighbors will be the ultimate objective. The murder of Litvinenko, and Moscow's brusque refusal to extradite Lugovoy, fit all too well into that pattern.